RYAN GANDER  TEST YOURSELF

a project by Ilaria Gianni and Ryan Gander

ROOM AVAILABLE

Everything started when Ryan Gander sent a Timeline to Ilaria Gianni, beginning in 800 BC and ending in 7006 AD, documenting over 500 of his works made during a ten-year period – works associated to events that occurred in history and to future ones that could possibly take place. Test yourself is a quiz on our historical knowledge that leads us into Ryan Gander’s practice through a selection of works drawn from the Timeline. Through the artist’s own words, the game reveals episodes, memories and back-stories, disclosing the conceptual processes and ideas behind his oeuvre. The project, specifically designed by Åbäke, who conceived the recent publication Ryan Gander: Catalogue Raisonnable Vol. 1 (JRP|Ringier, 2010), does not present any images. The participation of the reader is a fundamental element.

A – Glass mirrors backed with gold leaf are mentioned in Naturalis Historia by the Roman author Pliny the Elder.

Work – A Future Lorem Ipsum, 2006 A black and white photograph of the artist showing how his invented word, ‘Mitim’, is a physical palindrome.

Episode – The word Mitim was a bit of a useless failure. The objective was to introduce the word into the world as if it had always existed. I tried to do this by sending it to editors, journalists, writers, musicians etc. with the idea that they could use it in texts, plays, articles, stories and songs. It hadn’t occurred to me that when the word is typed out in any word processing software an aggressively jagged red line appears beneath it, acknowledging that it is not in the user dictionary and, in fact, doesn't exist. My belief was that editors would let it go, too ashamed that there was a word in the English language that one of their staff was using but which they didn't know. It rarely got past proofreaders and fact checkers, meaning the thousands of examples of it existing throughout literature in fact became a handful. Think ahead Gander.

Q – Where and when was tobacco first discovered and tasted by Europeans?

a. In 1492 on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, during Columbus’s expedition to the Indies. b. Between 1255 and 1262 during Niccolò and Maffeo Polo’s first travels through Asia. c. In 1488 while Bartholomew Diaz was sailing around the southernmost tip of Africa. d. In 1246 in Mongolia by John of Pian de Carpine, the first European to enter the court of the Great Khan.

A – 1492 – Two of Columbus's crewmen, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, are said to have encountered tobacco for the first time on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas. Whilst observing daily life, the natives presented them with dry leaves that were described as “spreading a peculiar fragrance”.

Work – Having done more work than most ten men — (Alchemy Box # 11), 2009 An alchemy box, appropriating the vessel of a locked Siglo cigar humidifier handcrafted from Macassar Ebony, is exhibited on the floor with its back to a wall. The contents of the box relate to the theme of ‘work ethic and class conflict’. The box is displayed alongside a rub down transfer wall text listing its contents.

Episode – The key to this humidor is on a shelf in my studio, cast into a brick of concrete. Unlike the other alchemy boxes it is therefore impossible to open. I’m always disheartened when people ask me if the contents are really inside them. No one believes I’ve put my credit cards and lottery tickets in them. As if I would lie, as if I would compromise the conceptual rigour and integrity of the work…

Q – Was Absinthe introduced as…

a. An extreme party drink at the Court of Louis XVI in 1776. b. An all–purpose patent remedy created by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire in Switzerland in 1702. c. A spiritual drink only available during the Bacchanalia in 200 BC. d. A plant fertilizer in the XVI century.

A – 1702 – Absinthe is introduced as an all-purpose patent remedy created by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor living in Couvet (CH).

Work – Come up on different streets, they both were streets of shame, or Absinthe blurs my thoughts, I think we should be moving on, 2009 A bronze figurine of a young female ballerina resembling Degas’ dancer stands atop an ultramarine blue cube to peer through the window of the front of the gallery space. Her hands are at the sides of her face, directing her gaze and shading her view from the reflections or shadows. Her abandoned plinth stands in the corner of the gallery.

Episode – Rather embarrassingly, quite a few titles in this series of works are appropriated from lyrics from songs by Dire Straits. I once played the song Romeo and Juliet at Wimbledon School of Art whilst teaching there. To illustrate this point, when the track had finished, the voice of a first year fine art student from out of the darkness, way at the back of the auditorium, spoke “Not cool”.

Q – The raised-dot writing system corresponds to…

a. Military codes invented during WWI that allow the sharing of top-secret information on the battlefield, without speaking. b. Egyptian hieroglyphs dating from around 1800 to 1900 BC. c. The system used by prisoners of the Roman Empire to count the passing days. d. The method widely used by blind people to read and write, invented in 1824.

A – 1824 - Louis Braille finishes inventing his raised-dot writing system at the age of 15.

Work – Like being balanced on the handlebars of a blind man’s bike, 2008 A number of coloured balls in differing sizes are exhibited on the floor of the gallery representing a translation of the Google logo in Braille. On entering the gallery space the spectator can find a fixed position from which all the balls appear to be the same size, giving the work a corrected perspective at one particular location.

Episode – The title originated from something the artist Bedwyr Williams said to me during dinner at his mansion in North Wales. I wrote it down and used it. Some people call that stealing. He used the phrase to explain an untrusting and unfruitful relationship between an artist and a gallerist. I have an image of an artist sitting on a blind gallerist’s handlebars in my mind, that I have not been able to rid myself of since.

Q – Which institution in London was known as “University of the Ghetto”?

a. Whitechapel Library in the late 1800s. b. Goldsmiths’s College, University of London in the 1980s. c. Hornsey College of Art in the mid 1800s. d. The Hunterian Museum – The Royal College of Surgeons of England in the late 1700s.

A – 1892 - Whitechapel Library, London (UK) was founded by the Liberal MP J. Passmore Edwards and quickly garnered a reputation as "the university of the ghetto".

Work – Is this guilt in you too — (Cinema Verso), 2006 A series of institutional corridors lead the spectator to a cavernous deserted space behind the projection screen of a constructed cinema. A soundtrack of what appears to be a film is audible in the distance and although the back of the projection is visible, the image is out of focus and indeterminable. Upon closer inspection, the viewer is able to peer into the vast empty auditorium via a scratched away clear section. From this location the soundtrack to the film is clearly audible, but the projection becomes invisible. The spectator is placed in the position of a blind person, which is the predicament of the lead character in the film Twenty-four seconds elapsed between the first and the last shot, 2006, which is being screened in the cinema.

Episode – During the first incarnation of this work at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, I was homeless and lived in the back room of the museum for a month. Sadly it was during heavy riots in the area. There is nothing more terrifying than being locked inside a heavily alarmed empty dark museum all night, whilst rioters run across the roof carrying petrol bombs. Since that experience I am skeptical of no fixed abode artists who float from residency to residency. Get an apartment.

Q – Who opened what was to become a fashion empire on the ground floor of the apartment of a famous horse breeder?

A – 1909 - Gabrielle Chanel opened a shop on the ground floor of Etienne Balsan's apartment in Paris – the beginnings of what would later become one of the greatest fashion empires in the world.

Work – Investigation # 98 — What you don’t know will never hurt you, 2008 Two framed and mounted antique prints. The first, a golden Chanel advert, with a mount that frames the print in five windows, covers a large majority of the text and reveals only the tips of the characters of the text. The second, a German print by Etienne Leopold Trovelot depicts the Zodiacal Light, an astronomical phenomenon that was once considered ‘a false dawn’.

Episode – I have no idea what this work is about. If an idea feels right I make it and call it an investigation and worry about what it means later. The pitfall of being a wildly non signature conceptual artist is that you have no style, you don't know what you are, the only thing holding it all together is meaning, and if there’s no meaning, people don't trust you, so in order to practice, I conduct investigations. It’s like I throw it all in the air and see how it lands. Get out clause.

Work – Remnants of Theo and Piet’s fall from 1924, through the Avery Coonley playhouse window, during a struggle brought on by an argument over the dynamic aspect of the diagonal line, into this white room, 2009 The installation consists of broken stained glass and sections from a lead window across the gallery floor, as if someone had fallen through a window at some speed. The amount and colour of the glass is taken from a reproduction of the centre panel of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1912 ‘Avery Coonley Playhouse: Triptych Window’, whilst the title refers to a disagreement between Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg in 1924, that led to a split, in the same year, over the relevance of the diagonal line in the construction of their compositions.

Episode – Idiots, Mondrian and Van Doesburg arguing about diagonal lines, it’s not like one of them slept with the other’s wife… I love those feuds in art history. Munari hated Calder because Calder was making Munari’s toys bigger and selling them to museums. These stories are how legacy comes into being.

Q – The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is...

a. The riddle Gollum asks Bilbo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. b. A Ghost Story from Scotland's Clyde Valley. c. The first and original electro-mechanical rotor machine used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. d. A work by Man Ray referring to Comte de Lautréamont’s famous phrase ‘Beautiful as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella'.

A – 1920 – Man Ray executes The Riddle or The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse.

Work – The riddle of Ducasse, meets Longly, meets something I remembered about half way between Iceland and KFC, 2006 Five framed black line drawings made by the artist attempt to represent a blanket thrown over an object — an exercise he would perform as a child, a practice method that he recollected when seeing a drawing of smoke by the artist George Henry Longley.

Episode – Longly is George Henry Longly, a really good artist and friend. We did a show together at Kaufman Gallery in Zurich, years ago. The work has this title because a work George made (a drawing of smoke) reminded me of drawings I used to make as a teenager, where I would throw my duvet in a pile on my bed and try to draw it. Thinking back they were quite advanced, but I don't have any of them anymore, only these five remain. I’ve tried to recreate them but they never look as good as I remember them.

A – 1924 - The Bauhaus chess set was designed by Josef Hartwig in Dessau (DE).

Work – Bauhaus Revisited, 2003 A Bauhaus chess set, designed by Josef Hartwig in 1924, is reproduced in blacklisted Zebrawood (Microberlina Brazzavillensis); it comes from the African rainforest.

Episode – A government collection (of an unnamed country) wanted to purchase this work, but they weren’t allowed to acquire any politically incorrect works. The work was made out of blacklisted Zebrawood from the African rainforest. That was the point of the work. The collection asked if it was possible to have it remade in Pine, failing to realise that the meaning was inherent in the politically incorrect materials. I often wonder how a Pine version would have looked – like it was from IKEA perhaps.

Q – What is Alan Smithee?

a. The first American Nouvelle Cuisine Chef. b. A famous English football player from the 1960s. c. The pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project. d. A brand of Australian cookies.

A – 1968 – The pseudonym Alan Smithee is first used by an anonymous film director.

Work – She walked ahead, leading him through a blizzard of characters, 2008 A two thousand word text written by an anonymous ghostwriter is pasted directly onto the gallery wall, which is immediately afterwards re-plastered. The wall is left the colour of the plaster. The text written by the ghostwriter brings to life the fictional character Alan Smithee, a pseudonym used since 1968 by cinema directors who want to dissociate themselves from a film for which they no longer want credit. The printed text was originally commissioned by the artist Mario Garcia Torres, to be used in the performance I am not a flopper or… (2007), but ultimately unsettled, unpublished and unwanted. The exclusive legal rights to this text belong to the artist.

Episode – Mario Garcia Torres and I are the best of friends, and because of that a lot of people think that the public dispute inherent in the construction of this artwork was created for the purpose of making interesting art. Sometimes we muse on this idea, and when we are out together at openings in Paris or London for example, we frequently discuss whether it would be an apt moment to have a public display of physical violence to enhance the myth. My father has always said, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

____________________________________________________________________________ Born in 1976, Ryan Gander lives and works in London. His photographs, films, installations, performances, sculptures, and inventions draw on multiple layers of facts and fiction. Censorship, precedence, mimetics, associative methodologies, authorship, ownership, appropriation, participation are only some of the issues tackled by Ryan Gander’s work. He has exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the world.